


Travelling Towards Tomorrow

by katyjo



Category: Tamora Pierce - Tortall
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-18
Updated: 2009-12-18
Packaged: 2017-10-04 12:45:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,067
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30211
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/katyjo/pseuds/katyjo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"With my mouth, I learnt to duck young." Or, Neal's first year as a squire.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Travelling Towards Tomorrow

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Trojie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Trojie/gifts).



**One**

Telling Kel that he’s going to be Lady Alanna’s squire – the Lioness’s squire – is harder than he’d imagined possible. Neal knows he’s wide eyed and crazy looking, as he waits for Kel to tell him that she hates him, that their friendship is over, that when he gets back to the palace he’ll be alone again. But she doesn’t, and Neal is suddenly gladder than he’d thought possible for the existence of Lord Raoul of Goldenlake and Malorie’s Peak.

 

 

**Two**

Pirate’s Swoop is somehow perfect for Lady Alanna; remote and dangerous and unconventional. If it weren’t also cold and tall, it would be a perfect match. Kel would hate it, Neal thinks absently, with its high, high walls and long, long drops towards the sea.

As he stands on the walls, with his knight mistress beside him in a lilac silk dress, he wonders how she ever came to settle down there at all. It seems so unlike her, to have an actual home, an actual husband and family. He’d have expected her to fight that as hard as she has fought everything else, for years and years. Like Kel fights everything, whether it’s her battle or not.

Then the Baron comes out and rests a hand at her waist, and her smile tells him everything Neal couldn’t ask.

Love, Neal thinks, can be very detrimental to the character.

**Three**

“Come on, you.”

Neal tugs his blanket further over his head. Obviously no one would actually be trying to wake him up at such an ungodly hour on such a cold day. Clearly this must be some kind of nightmare.

“Don’t forget which one of us controls your future,” the voice adds, as the blankets are pulled further away from Neal’s freezing face. “For the next four years, at least.”

It’s not a dream, Neal finally concedes and, with effort, opens his eyes. “You’re a very mean woman,” he says, mumbled enough that she can pretend not to hear him. Her wicked smirk tells him that she did, all the same.

“I’m investing in your future,” the Lioness says, pulling him up by the arm. “I have a lesson for you to learn.” That, Neal thinks, sounds ominous.

His lesson is down in the village, it seems. Neal trudges after Lady Alanna, glowering out from under his hair at the small houses and the staring children with running noses. It’s flopping across his forehead a little more than normal, he realises. Maybe it’s time for a haircut.

The Lioness ducks into a hut-like house, past a young boy standing in the doorway. “Lissa?” she calls, and Neal sees a harassed looking woman appear from the second room, a child on her hips and two more wiping their noses on her skirts.

“I was hoping you’d let Neal here practice his healing on the children,” Lady Alanna goes on, a broad smile across her face.

“What’s wrong with them?” Neal asks, nervous. They don’t look obviously sick, so perhaps it’s something serious, something deep. He’s never cured much beside broken bones and bruises before. Diseases are still a little beyond him.

“Oh, they’ve got the sniffles,” Lissa tells him, as one of the little girls sneezes.

Neal sighs. He should have known.

**Four**

He can’t help but think, in the darkness of a tent at night, listening to the Lioness snore lightly from her tent across the way, that he’s taken Kel’s place somehow. He knows that she’s happy, doing well with Lord Raoul. Knows that, even if she’d wanted to, the King would never have let Lady Alanna take Kel for her squire. Knows that his father’s intervention wasn’t the only reason she took him instead.

Still. Thinking about the might have beens keeps Neal awake at night. Especially when they’re on the road, and there’s a stone sticking into his spine as he tries to sleep.

**Five**

It’s strange, being away from the palace. He’s lived there for most of his life, on and off, and Neal can’t get used to the smaller, quieter, chatter of the people at Pirates’ Swoop, when they’re there. On the road, with just the two of them, it’s even stranger. He misses his family, his friends. He misses Kel, but at least he’s kept up to date on her exploits with the King’s Own in letters from his cousin, Dom.

_‘As much as I like her, I think your friend might have a screw loose. Apparently, it’s not enough to take on a centaur single handed. Now she’s adopted a godsblessed griffin!’_

Sometimes Neal thinks it might be more reassuring not to get the letters at all.

**Six**

The palace in November is full of talk about the Yamani ladies, due to arrive any day now.  Neal is personally considerably more interested in staying out of his knight mistress’s way, and hoping she doesn’t notice he’s avoiding her. There’s a cold going around the palace, as always with the first icy snap, and Neal doesn’t want to have to spend his days at home curing the sniffles, when he could be catching up with his friends, or his books.

On his fourth day back at the palace, he’s hiding in the library, revelling in a long, dry description of something that happened hundreds of years ago, just for the fun of it, when dark red hair appears around the door, followed by the rest of Cleon. 

Things are even better after that, not least because Cleon knows some truly excellent hiding places. Neal has been underestimating him, it appears.

Then Kel arrives a few days later, still not hating him, and things are better still as the three of them stroll the palace grounds in the late autumn chill, swapping stories and anecdotes and boasts. The weirdest part is the idea that, for the first time in years, there are things about each others lives that they don’t all already know, that they haven’t shared.

It’s only twenty four hours after this revelation that things return to normal. Neal checks the corridor outside his new favourite hiding place, slips his book under his arm, and steps out, resisting the urge to whistle nonchalantly.

“Queenscove!” For a lady short in stature, she really has quite the bellow. Neal pauses, winces, and turns. “I have a job for you...” 

He still doesn’t know where the Lioness was hiding.

**Seven**

“Kel objected, of course.” The Lioness’s voice is softer than Neal thinks he’s ever heard it. Beside them, the fire in the front drawing room of Pirates’ Swoop crackles and pops as Neal tries to concentrate on what she’s saying. “According to Raoul, she dragged the King and Queen to one side and good as told them to change the law.”

Neal can’t help but smile a little at that. “How many times have I told you she’s crazy? You think, just because she’s a girl that wants to be a knight she’s got to be practical and sensible. But I’m telling you. Utterly insane.”

The Lioness quirks an eyebrow at him. “Do you think she was wrong? Believing that Lalassa, that all servants, deserve the same rights as their masters?”

“Not in the slightest.” Neal tries to look offended, but from Alanna’s smirk, he’s not sure he succeeds. “That’s the problem with Kel. She’s nearly always right, in the end. She just has to act crazy to convince anyone else.”

**Eight**

Neal likes a good party. He likes an excuse to dress up, and an excuse to stare at all the pretty court outfits. But still, on balance, he’d rather be curled up with a good book. Which is why Lord Raoul’s ‘gatherings’ are the best – an excuse to sit around and look at maps and books while still getting nibbles and drinks. Not to mention that Lady Alanna and Lord Raoul are so much happier. And, Neal and Kel decide, if their knights are happy, the world is an infinitely better place.

He sits back, helps himself to another sweet pastry, and listens to his elders debate... whatever it is they’ve decided to disagree about tonight.

Midwinter truly is the most wonderful time of the year.

**Nine**

As Spring progresses, Neal begins to suspect that they’re actually just trailing around the kingdom after Kel and Lord Raoul.

First, they catch up with the Baron, who tells them all about fighting pirates with the Own.

“How did she do?” the Lioness asks, staring out of the window, as if she doesn’t much care about the answer.

George Cooper gives her a knowing grin. “If you’d been here, you could have seen for yourself.”

She scowls, but stays quiet.

Next, they head to Persopolis, and hear from the Bazhir all about their visitors who have just left.

“Did she look well?” Lady Alanna asks, and the Bazhir she’s talking to gives her a slightly pitying look. Seems even out in the desert, people heard about the row between the King and his Champion.

Neal can’t help but wonder if she only took him on as a way to keep tabs on Kel. He makes an effort to tell her everything in his letters from Dom, and the occasional missive he receives from the girl squire herself, just in case. Wouldn’t want to fall down on the job, after all.

**Ten**

“Queenscove,” Alanna says, sticking her head into his tent one morning. “You’ll never believe it. Despite the warm weather, it seems that a lot of the kids here have developed a case of...”

“The sniffles,” Neal finishes for her, and heads out to find the afflicted children, thinking, _Kel couldn’t do this, anyway._

**Eleven**

As summer approaches, the Lioness gets grumpier and grumpier. It takes Neal a little while to notice.

Then, two days after they’ve returned to the Pirate’s Swoop again, she disappears into her room and won’t come out. That, Neal notices.

He hovers outside her door for a while; she’d planned to take him down to the village again that day. Someone with a badly healed broken arm she wanted him to look at with her. Eventually, he knocks, and opens the door.

She throws a glass at his head, and he beats a hasty retreat.

The Baron finds him in the library, reading up on the healing of bones, just in case. “Did she get you?”

Neal shakes his head. “With my mouth, I learnt to duck young.”

Cooper chuckles. “I’d imagine you would, at that.” He groans as he sinks into the leather chair opposite Neal, the sound of a man who’s been on his feet for far too long, and knows he has to get up again soon. Neal’s not entirely sure what’s going on, but he quietly closes his book anyway, forgetting to note his current page. “Do you play chess?”

“Badly,” Neal says, not entirely honestly.

The Baron nods. “Perfect,” he says, and drags a board out from the chest beside him, without even having to get out of his chair. Together, they set the board and pieces up on a low table between their chairs, and flip a coin to start.

Some time later, around the time that Neal realises his white queen is in serious trouble, Cooper says, “It’s only once a year. Only this day. It’s... it’s the memories, I suppose.”

Neal flips back through his memory, trying to imagine what might be wrong with this particular day. It’s too early in the year for it to be something to do with the fabled coronation; too late for her Ordeal. He doesn’t have to ask though.

“It’s her birthday,” his opponent explains, leaving Neal as confused as ever, as the Baron takes his queen.

It’s only a week later that Neal remembers hearing that Alanna of Trebond had once had a twin.

**Twelve**

It’s been months since he saw any of his friends, and it’s almost a relief to walk into the bustling, noisy camp of the Grand Progress. As he and the Lioness meander through the tents and the people, Neal’s eyes are sharp and bright, looking for people he knows in amongst the familiar strangers. Then, in the distance, he sees a group of young people, recognises the kimonos of the Yamani women, and blinks at the sight of something sparkling and bright flying up in the air and back down again.

Neal walks forward, hand outstretched, towards them.


End file.
